Author's Statement

This story represents new territory for me by abandoning my typical fragmentary structure and multiple narrators in favor of a single-perspective thriller with sustained escalating stakes. Where my usual work fragments across voices, time periods, and typographic experimentation, this piece compresses my observational mode into a linear survival narrative with physical danger driving every scene. I've maintained my signature elements—neologisms, technology as character, pop-culture vocabulary—but deployed them in service of propulsive momentum rather than cultural meditation. The challenge was to write something relentlessly readable while staying true to my voice. Instead of the reader surfing between vignettes, they're locked into one character's increasingly impossible situation. This is Coupland attempting a page-turner.